For those of us still impatiently waiting, what is your experience so far with “Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition”?
—- I ordered just 2 hours in but the vendor I used sold out in 21 minutes. I just found out I also missed the restock, so hopefully some time next month.
It’s my experience with all voice assistants. I hate them as a UX in general.
Yeah… if it works it can be useful but sadly this is not quite there for whatever reason, underpowered HA hardware or insufficient training maybe. Like if the hardware sucks it should just take a while and then work but the fact that it doesn’t makes it very useless, and no I dont want to connect to their cloud service thats the whole point of HA is to stay local…
I just haven’t seen any implementation that works for me. Like, I use Google assistant sometimes and it really can’t do anything reliably besides setting a timer. I just don’t think it’s a good way to interact with systems to begin with.
Maybe other people have better luck with it, and it’s good that the HA Devs are building a free version of it, but it’s just not for me.
I use Siri for this kinda thing and it is 100% accurate for setting lights and timers. Sometimes I just want to talk instead of pressing phone buttons or switches, it can save me from getting out of bed. Definitely not a necessity though.
I also have excellent results with Siri. While I have it require a click before listening, I’m always wearing my watch so it’s still pretty convenient.
But I have to admit the always listening part is kind of nice. It started off innocently enough : hey my thermostat can do Alexa. Then we discovered the intercom feature and ended up with one in every room